To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the
history of the Creation, saying:

"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had
begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise?
Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled
inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be
performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly
through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw
off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved
and tossed, from masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely
solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the
ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest
trees, huge germ springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding,
fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play
unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of
good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is
passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at
any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree.
And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the
purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world
there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the
struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by
human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted
to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked
God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven,
until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been
appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that
thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the
strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And
God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation
and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's
sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have
it performed again.'"

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more
void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid
such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That
man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all
the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human
genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which
rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's
habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so
powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A
strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the
revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has
brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with
sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all
the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal
of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to
examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him
alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and
in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his
outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of
his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing
that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself
before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship.
Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of
degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the
jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most
precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and
more will not be required. The religion of Moloch -- as such creeds may be
generically called -- is in essence the cringing submission of the slave,
who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master
deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet
acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited
respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim
of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease,
must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage.
Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously
reject them, still urging that naked power is worthy of worship. Such is
the attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the
divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there
is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base
their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the
survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an
answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we
have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that,
in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the
world of ideals. Thus Man creates, God, all-powerful and all-good, the
mystic unity of what is and what should be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and,
in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from
which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt
the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us:
Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist
and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own
conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and
affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which
Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is
the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile
universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our
best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect
rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts"
which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in
the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise,
and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the
realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for
the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though
none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe.
If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In
this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God
created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must
submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty
planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which
enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us
descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows
fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods,
seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean
constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always
actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent,
appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But
indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied
with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion
springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the
wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of
our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the
submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of
our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our
thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of
beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the
vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts
not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to
those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those
personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although
the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet
Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the
Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the
things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real
goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a
fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad,
though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion
supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving
that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the
discovery of many austere truths.

But
there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when
they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man
comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is
nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a
passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by
death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn,
each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however
beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them.
It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without
repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right:
it is the very gate of wisdom.

But
passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation
alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting
foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in
music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the
golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote
from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from
the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the
contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in
our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and
an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not
incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except
for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of
darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of
the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of
abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of
untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the
empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads
again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new
joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When,
without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to
resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the
non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last
so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute
it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold
replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world
-- in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events
of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death -- the insight
of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own
thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over
the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which
it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its
achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden
treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to
swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the
proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the
very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest
mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his
columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life
continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the
servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless
city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy
the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors
who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious
invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But
the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or
less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the
spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, there is a
sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth,
the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.
In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little
trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of
day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the
flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid
hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must
struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole
weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.
Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into
the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter
of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost
shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be
-- Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the
powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity
to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

This
is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its
motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late
autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still
glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or
strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was
eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the
things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a
soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.

The
life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with
the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and
Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and
because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as
they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour,
is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow
before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make
it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness,
to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for
eternal things -- this is emancipation, and this is the free man's
worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for
Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by
the purifying fire of Time.

United
with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common
doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding
over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march
through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness
and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may
tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our
sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is
the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery
is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their
sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the
difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark
of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
glowed.

Brief
and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom
falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned to-day [sic] to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to
pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet
the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day;
disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the
shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of
chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate,
for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned
despite the trampling march of unconscious power.